


The Enchanted Violin: Korrigan Insert

by paperandsong



Series: Leroux Inserts [1]
Category: Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera & Related Fandoms, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra | Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
Genre: Angst, Ankou, Breton Folklore, Fae & Fairies, Folklore, France (Country), Ghosts, Gothic, Hallucinations, Horror, Korrigans, Multi, Mushrooms, Nostalgia, One Shot, Perros-Guirec, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-09
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26874004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperandsong/pseuds/paperandsong
Summary: Christine and Raoul take mushrooms before listening to the Angel of Music play the Resurrection of Lazarus in Perros-Guirec. Leroux insert.
Relationships: Christine Daaé/Erik | Phantom of the Opera, Raoul de Chagny/Christine Daaé, Raoul de Chagny/Erik | Phantom of the Opera
Series: Leroux Inserts [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2110866
Comments: 14
Kudos: 9





	1. Korrigan Insert

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All text in italics is quoted from Leroux’s Enchanted Violin chapter, taken from the A. Teixeira de Mattos English translation, with a little help from the newer Mirielle Ribière translation. Canon insert, canon-compliant.

_The wind fell with the evening. Raoul was surrounded by icy darkness, but he did not feel the cold. It was here, he remembered, that he used to come with little Christine to see the Korrigans dance at the rising of the moon. He had never seen any, though his eyes were good, whereas Christine, who was a little shortsighted, pretended that she had seen many. He smiled at the thought and then suddenly gave a start._  
 _A voice behind him said:_  
 _“Do you think the Korrigans will come this evening?”_  
 _It was Christine. He tried to speak. She put her gloved hand on his mouth_ and slipped something dry and leathery between his teeth. She held her hand firm over his lips as his tongue rejected the bitter earthy taste. He searched for her eyes in the darkness, pleading with her to let him spit it out. But the look on her face was so full of innocent nostalgia that he surrendered to the foul thing, chewing just enough to swallow it whole.   
“Do you remember when we used to roam about the cow fields looking for mushrooms?” she whispered conspiratorially. “I went to an old woman and found some for us today.”   
She handed him a small flask of whiskey.   
Oh, Christine, he thought. Always remembering what we used to do, when really it was only the once. But Raoul was so eager to please her, he would not contradict her - nor would he spit the thing out. For he too wished that they had spent many more such afternoons long ago.  
“You might have invited me to come along,” he said with faux-tartness, gladly chasing the taste with alcohol.  
“I would have liked your company,” she sighed. “But you treated me very poorly earlier and I felt it was better to spend the day alone.”  
She handed him a second piece, and then a third.  
“I thought you stayed in your room all day?”  
He rolled them on his tongue, gagging, moving them down his throat as quickly as possible. The whiskey scarcely masked their taste.   
“Were you watching my door?”  
“Well, yes, Christine. I waited all day for you to come out. How did you go roam about without my seeing you?”  
“I escaped out the window and climbed down the tree,” she giggled. She handed him a fourth, and then a fifth.   
“Nevermind,” he sighed. “I am glad you have come to me now, Christine. Yes, I do think the korrigans will come this evening.” She handed him a sixth, and then a seventh.  
“And what about you? Won’t you take any yourself?”  
“I made myself a tea before I came to find you here.” She handed him an eighth, and then a ninth.  
“Would that you had made tea for me! Instead you hold my mouth closed as I eat them raw and whole. Disgusting! It is you who have treated me poorly.”  
They laughed together and leaned back into the snow that covered the hillside to wait. The moon rose behind the clouds and over the water in the distance. It was this that Raoul had most wanted when he had traveled to Perros-Guirec: to lay next to this ethereal creature who had haunted his memory for so long. She handed him a tenth, and then an eleventh. And then a twelfth. He mindlessly consumed them all. He finished her flask of whiskey.  
“Sing me a song, Christine. One that you learned here, in Brittany, when we used to wander around and beg for songs and stories from the old people.”  
She hummed a moment as she flipped through the songbook of her mind. She landed on the Ar rannoù. In perfect Breton she sang the ancient lessons of an old Druid master given to an inquiring child,

One Death, the father of pain  
Two oxen harnessed to a shell  
Three kingdoms of Merlin  
Four whetstones upon which Merlin will sharpen his swords  
Five ages across time  
Six waxen children conceived by the light of the moon  
Seven planets  
Eight white heifers belonging to the Lady  
Nine korrigans dancing in the light of the full moon, around a spring, atop the heather, in clothes of white wool, with white flowers all in their flowing white hair  
Ten ships of warriors from Nantes, woe to Vannes!  
Eleven warrior priests remain from Vannes with shattered swords, limping on crutches  
Twelve months of the year, twelve signs of the stars, signs that battle each other with their arrows until the trumpet sounds and that is the end of your lesson and of all lessons

As she sang the ninth verse, she reached out and laid her hand gently on Raoul’s arm. Even through her glove and the thick sleeve of his coat he could feel the warm nostalgia of her touch. She remembered everything. He had a sudden urge to roll himself onto her, to let her feel all that he had also remembered for so long. But he resisted. He had already insulted her integrity once today. He must show her the reverence he held for her. He must not touch her. Except, perhaps, her little hand. He grasped it and pulled it to his chest.  
“Christine, why have you invited me here?”  
She withdrew her hand from his. She sat up abruptly and her demeanor shifted entirely. No longer was she the angelic young woman who sang folk songs in the snow. A shadow drew across her face that was visible to him even in the bright moonlight. 

_“Listen, Raoul. I have decided to tell you something serious, very serious...Do you remember the legend of the Angel of Music?”_

[Christine confides in Raoul that she has been visited by the Angel of Music. An incredulous Raoul cannot help but to laugh at her naïveté and thoroughly fucks up the entire evening for himself.]

 _“Well, Christine, I think that somebody is making a game of you.”_  
 _She gave a cry and ran away. He ran after her, but, in a tone of fierce anger, she called out: “Leave me! Leave me!” And she disappeared._  
“Fairies are not real, Christine!” he called after her.   
He flopped back onto the snow in frustration. She had plied him with mushrooms and then abandoned him cold in the snow-covered heath - for the second time in a single day! She was impossible.   
He stared up at the clear winter sky. A change was taking hold of him. The radiance of the stars moved him deeply. The texture of darkness transformed from the cold-hearted void of the universe to a swath of warm black velvet scattered with diamonds. The mantle of the Lady, under constant threat of being yanked away the moment she tires of this world.   
He thought of the single other time Christine had led him on such a journey. It had happened when they were older, when their summers of roaming the moors and trampling the heather were long over. He had returned to Perros just once as a young man to visit the Daaé family, simply so that he might gaze upon her face once more. After tea with her father, Raoul had found her in the garden. From there she led him further from the house, down a little trail, and into a cow pasture. She began searching earnestly for something in the ground, but she would not say what. Finally, she made a delighted noise and picked a few mushrooms out of a healthy tuft of grass. She flicked the insects out of the caps and convinced the young man to consume a few.   
He spit the first out right away. He thought she was making a game of him, to trick him into eating something so repugnant. But she brazenly popped several into her little mouth and while her eyes watered at their repellant flavor, she swallowed them, daring him to do the same. They lay in the grass under the golden clouds of a setting sun which became all manner of creatures before their clarified eyes. They held hands as they pointed up to the sky to tell the other what they were seeing, until gradually it felt as though they were seeing through the same set of eyes. At last, he could see the world as she had always seen it; as full of wonder.   
The moon rose and spilled its white light across the dark sea; a river of milk that ran from the horizon to the shoreline. A river upon which scurried a number of smaller, brighter lights. White orbs of brilliance moving at a manic pace. Soon, they were clambering up the hillside, chittering excitedly. Little men and little women, dressed all in white, surrounded him in a swirl of busyness and excitement. They were just as adorable as Christine had always said they were, and just as her ancient song had described them; with white flowers in their flowing white hair. They formed a circle at his feet and began to perform a reel of some sort, with partners meeting to dance in the center of the ring while the others sang and clapped their little hands together. They were charming, though impish; no doubt full of mischief. Raoul felt his heart swell with happiness. At last he could see what Christine had always seen! Old man Daaé had not filled her head with nonsense after all. The veil had been lifted before him and the spirit world hung in plain view. He felt a pang of regret that Christine was not at his side, that he had driven her off with his mockery.   
He was so moved by their dance in the snow that Raoul sat upon his heels and began to clap along with the little korrigans and attempted to sing their song. They suddenly halted their dance and turned to stare at him. Their precious little faces were quite changed now. They bared their teeth at him and ran towards him with claw-like hands outstretched.   
Raoul jumped to his feet in terror and ran down the hill towards the village. 

In her hurt and anger Christine fled to the beach at Trestraou. She walked along to the edge of the shore and climbed onto the rocks. From there she gazed into the dark waves as the magic continued to work its way through her body. Like Raoul, the radiant planets and stars that competed against the moonlit sky touched her deeply. A line of dancing korrigans came out of the water and hurried past her up the hillside. A great calm washed over her as she prepared herself for an evening that had only just begun.   
Out in the water, on the Roc’h Stur, sat a siren glowing in the moonlight. The siren slid a mother-of-pearl comb through her silver hair, flicking her silver tail against the rock. When she had finished, she began to sing. Christine strained her ears to hear the music under the roar of the waves and wind. She leaned her body forward, towards the sea. And then, to her great sadness, the siren lept from the rock and into the water.   
For a time, Christine calmly observed the night, feeling a oneness with that point of earth where the rock and water and sky met in her heart.   
Why had she invited Raoul to this place? She was not sure she understood it herself. She had sent the invitation at the suggestion of the voice. The voice who had made scene after scene and told her that if she did not love Raoul then she would make no attempt to avoid him. As if the voice desired Raoul to come to Perros more than even Christine desired it. Did he dare her to show the young man her affections? Such a jealous voice, her Angel!  
Silently, the body of Saint Guirec emerged from the waves and walked out onto the beach. Only it wasn’t Saint Guirec as he might have looked the day he died, but rather, the rotting corpse of the old monk; skin rough and scaly, nose long since fallen off. He nodded as he passed her by. Ah, but Christine knew this Guirec. This was not the saint in flesh and blood. It was only his statue that had emerged from the sea. For in paintings, Saint Guirec had always had a perfect nose, but in wood and stone his nose had been worn away by the hands of countless women pricking it with pins for protection. It was this stone effigy that walked off the sand and up the road towards the church where Christine herself would go at midnight. She would see him there. She slid off her rock and made her way back to the Inn of the Setting Sun to wait until it was time. 

_Raoul returned to the inn feeling very weary, very low-spirited and very sad. He was told that Christine had gone to her bedroom saying that she would not be down to dinner. Raoul dined alone, in a very gloomy mood._

[At half-past eleven, Raoul hears Christine leave the inn and climbs down the tree outside his bedroom window to follow her. He falls out and even the thud of his body in the snow and the whisper of his light cursing does not attract her attention.] 

Christine pretended to ignore Raoul trailing behind her along the way to the church. Perhaps if she gave him no notice then the voice could find no fault in her behavior and would still deem her worthy enough to fulfil his promise to her. For, in her heightened state, she was ever more aware of the presence of the voice around her. It had hovered in the corners of her room at the inn as she counted the hours until midnight, watching her as much as a voice could watch. It followed her even now as she glided silently through that preternatural night.  
The snow and the moon illuminated the undulating path before her. The village was shrouded in a special kind of quiet. She could hear only the crunching of snow beneath her boots and the louder crunching of snow beneath Raoul’s. There was no one about, no one awake, except for a trio of Laundry Women carrying their grim loads back from a haunted spring on the moor. Christine knew enough to look away from them as they passed by on their webbed feet, lest they force her to wash the clothes of the dead alongside them. She very nearly turned to Raoul to warn him, but she was comforted by the thought that he knew the legend as well as she. Just as her father’s tales often turned dark, the old Breton villagers delighted in giving the beggar children a little story that would later visit them in their nightmares. Look away, Raoul, she prayed.   
The church clock touched a quarter to twelve and she broke into a run. Would he punish her for arriving late? She ran through the little gate and into the churchyard. The snow here glistened in the moonlight, casting wavering shadows of crosses across the graves. She found the site of her father’s repose and knelt beside it. It hummed with the tuning of his violin from deep underground. Her heart fluttered in relief. No, the voice would not punish her. Not even as Raoul lurked about in the shadows. He would bless her with music upon her father’s own violin, just as he had promised.  
There was a scurrying about her skirts. It was the little korrigans, come to sit around her in the snow as she waited for the clock to strike midnight. At the twelfth sound of the bell, she stretched out her arms in an ecstatic embrace of the sky and the stars and the moon and the korrigans stirred and whispered. She felt at peace with the cold that nipped her cheeks and toes. Every fiber of her body anticipated the music and when it resounded through the churchyard she felt her soul die and float away. She pushed the snow away from the earth and laid her trembling body over her father’s grave so that she might better feel the vibrations of the violin from deep within. She pressed her forehead to the frozen soil in submissive reverence.  
The Angel had blessed her with this music - music upon which her soul could soar and brush against the sandaled feet of her father in heaven where he had surely made a place for her. And she knew, by that divine sound, that the Angel loved her and would never, never leave her.

_A few weeks later, when the tragedy at the Opera_ [in which la Carlotta croaked like a frog, the chandelier killed Mme. Giry’s replacement, and Mlle. Daaé disappeared for two weeks] _compelled the intervention of the public prosecutor, M. Mifroid, the commissary of police, examined the Vicomte de Chagny touching the events of the night at Perros…_

[M. Mifroid asks the young aristocrat a series of yes or no questions which Raoul answers with the eagerness of someone who will bend any conversation to the topic of the one they love.]

 _Mifroid: Are you superstitious?_  
 _Raoul:_ [With ruffled indignation] _No, monsieur, I am a practising Catholic._  
 _Mifroid: In what condition of mind were you?_  
 _Raoul:_ [Shifts nervously in the manner of a liar] _Very healthy and peaceful, I assure you._ [Redacted from final report] But what I fear to tell you, M. Mifroid, is that the music entranced me as much as it entranced Mlle. Daaé. I felt her ecstasy move within me as if it were my own. Though she pretended to ignore me, I had never felt such union with her. As she prostrated herself across her father’s grave, I saw the earth open up and old man Daaé rise up from the dead, violin at his rotting chin. I saw her fingers crawl to the tips of his dead feet. Only, M. Daaé had never played with such a divine touch. I fell to my own knees, at last a believer in Christine’s Angel. Christine and I, and the little korrigans, and all those grinning skulls, we were all frozen in the same wonder. _I cannot say how far my imagination wandered and where it stopped._  
_When the music stopped, I seemed to hear a noise from the skulls in the heap of bones; it was as though they were chuckling and I could not help shuddering._  
 _Mifroid:_ [Crosses and uncrosses the leg upon which his notepad is settled] _Did it not occur to you that the musician might be hiding behind that very heap of bones?_  
 _Raoul: It was the one thought that did occur to me, monsieur, so much so that I omitted to follow Mlle. Daaé, when she stood up and walked slowly to the gate. She was so much absorbed just then that I am not surprised that she did not see me._  
 _Mifroid:_ [Professionally suppresses an eyeroll] _Then what happened that you were found in the morning lying half-dead on the steps of the high altar?_  
 _Raoul: First a skull rolled to my feet...then another...then another...It was as if I were the mark of a ghastly game of bowls._ [Redacted. Note in margin: M. le Vicomte appears quite unwell] My feet sank into the snow and the korrigans came and surrounded me in concentric rings through which the skulls rolled and hit my captured ankles. They cheered as if it were the unseen player whose side they had chosen. Little fuckers. 

[Raoul sees a shadow glide along the sacristy wall and into the church. Raoul follows and bravely (or stupidly) catches the shadow’s cloak in his fingers.]

_As I did not let go of the cloak, the shadow turned round; and I saw a terrible death’s head, which darted a look at me from a pair of scorching eyes._ [Redacted in red pen] He reached out to me with the long, bony fingers of a single hand and held me by the throat. He lifted me to his face so that I might know the depth of nothing behind the flicker of his eyes. And I wanted nothing more than to dive into that nothing, to swim in it and never come out again. I offered no resistance but tilted my head back, offering my throat freely. I had seen the Angel of Music! Not even Christine had seen this face, this wonder, this horror. The moonlight streamed in behind him, illuminating the colors of the stained glass and the faces of the waxen saints that adorned the high altar. I stood before that audience of saints and angels and yet I was certain that they could not protect me, as I was in the clutches of the parish Ankou, come to collect my soul in his ox-cart. I saw the hate of a rival forged in his eyes - a hate that bordered on desire. No, he was not the Ankou, the mere servant of Death - he was the one Death, the father of pain. He closed his fingers around the arteries in my throat with the deftness of an assassin, with the affection of a lover. He grinned at me. No, he was not even Death. _I felt as if I were face to face with Satan, and, in the presence of this unearthly apparition,_ and perhaps due in part to the mushrooms and the whiskey, _my heart gave way, my courage failed me…and I remember nothing more until I recovered at the Setting Sun._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and reviews are deeply appreciated. Let me know your thoughts on the story!


	2. Night Visions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed the story! I didn't have a tumblr account when I posted this, so I didn't have a place to share these great images I found during the research that helped to inspire this fic. So I’ll share them with you here. But also, I do have an account now. 
> 
> I love exploring every little detail of Leroux’s novel. I hope you find this as interesting as I did.

  
Postcard by Unknown author 

**Église Saint-Jacques de Perros-Guirec**

[ ](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Perros-Guirec_-_%C3%89glise_Saint-Jacques_-_Martin-Sabon_06.jpg#/media/Fichier:Perros-Guirec_-_%C3%89glise_Saint-Jacques_-_Martin-Sabon_06.jpg)  
  


Looking at churches in Perros-Guirec, I think the Église Saint-Jacques is a good candidate for the one Leroux may have had in mind. It sits just 1.1 km from Plage Trestraou (where the Inn of the Setting Sun is supposed to be located, and where the affair of the scarf blown into the sea takes place). It has a clock in its tower, as mentioned in the novel. And, in this older photo you can see there used to be gravestones in the churchyard. The gravestones are no longer there, so no, you won’t find Daaé’s resting place. I wonder if the bones were left in place though? I imagine they are still there.

**Saint Guirec**

[ ](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_Guirec.JPG#/media/Fichier:Saint_Guirec.JPG)

Saint Guirec was a 6th century Welsh monk who traveled to Brittany to Christianize the Celtic Bretons. This stone statue of Guirec sits in the water at the Plage Saint Guirec, less than 6 km from the Plage Trestraou. 

[ ](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J%C3%B3venes_que_acuden_a_visitar_a_San_Guirec_el_d%C3%ADa_de_Santa_Catalina_para_conseguir_un_marido_antes_de_terminar_el_a%C3%B1o.jpg#/media/Fichier:J%C3%B3venes_que_acuden_a_visitar_a_San_Guirec_el_d%C3%ADa_de_Santa_Catalina_para_conseguir_un_marido_antes_de_terminar_el_a%C3%B1o.jpg)

**Jeunes femmes devant l'oratoire de Saint-Guirec by Frédéric de Haenen, 1905**

Both the stone statue and an older wooden statue of Guirec are missing their noses as apparently it was a local tradition for women to prick the nose with some kind of needle for protection for themselves or their fishermen husbands. I do not know if Leroux knew of this detail of Guirec's nose when he chose Perros as Christine's hometown, but it's an interesting coincidence.

**Les Lavandières**

  
**Les Lavandières ou laveuses de nuit by Maurice Sand (George Sand's son), published in Légendes rustiques, 1858**

What if all the stories the Breton villagers told young Christine and Raoul were scary? Les Lavandières are ghostly apparitions of women doing the laundry of the dead. Some versions of them are even darker than that. Christine knows it's best not to look at them. 

_There is no pond or spring that is not haunted, either by night washerwomen, or by other spirits, more or less annoying._

George Sand, Légendes rustiques


End file.
